Horwath pushes to forefront in final debate
In their last big chance to make their case to Ontario’s voters before next month’s election, in Sunday night’s provincial leaders’ debate, Kathleen Wynne was cerebral, Doug Ford was all gut, and Andrea Horwath pounded them both from an unaccustomed position as the frontrunner. Less than two weeks out, polls show Horwath and her New Democrats way ahead of Wynne and her Liberals and surging to tie or surpass Ford’s Progressive Conservatives. In three campaigns, she’s never been the leader the others are trying to tear down.
Horwath clearly planned to take command of the discussion and she executed. She interrupted both her opponents but especially Ford, rarely letting him develop a full thought before she barged in with a “That’s not true, Doug,” or a “Do you even have a plan?”
Ford defended himself against Horwath’s repeated charges that he favours the rich, for instance. “I don’t know who the so-called rich people are ...” he began.
But there was Horwath: “You’re giving them 1,200 bucks a year. You should know them.”
The idea is to look like the boss. Done too much, it comes across as rude and overbearing, and some people probably thought she was, but Horwath made herself the debate’s centre.
Ford has said very little that’s new since the first days of the campaign. He sounds good if you don’t know much about what he’s talking about. He took a question about why voters should trust each of the leaders, for instance, and answered with a familiar lie.
“What I say I’m going to do, we’re going to do. I’m the only one with a proven track record of governing and saving people money,” he said. Specifically, when he was a Toronto city councillor, he and his brother Rob saved taxpayers $1.16 billion, he said.
This isn’t even true enough for politics. You get that number if you take a bunch of stuff they did (cut some taxes, cut some programs) and a bunch of stuff they didn’t do (give city workers raises), and add it all up as if each thing were the same. Run a business that way and see how long your accountants let you live.
Ford plastered on a smile in both debates, but by the end of Sunday night you could tell his molars were just about ground down to nubs.
Horwath got under Wynne’s skin, accusing her of selling off the province’s Hydro One utility after having said she wouldn’t.
“You want people to believe we sold Niagara Falls and we didn’t,” an irritated Wynne shot back. The Liberals sold just over half of one component of the electricity system, she said. “We sold a piece of a piece of a piece.”
When Wynne got mad, she found some fire.
Ford’s plan for health care consists of adding tens of thousands of nursing-home beds. Both the other parties promise that, too, and it’s necessary, but not sufficient.
“We’re going to end hallway health care once and for all,” he said, when a video question from Nepean’s Daljit Nirman asked for specifics. “And the way we’re going to do it is we’re going to get input from the front-line workers.”
“You know, Doug, you could have had those conversations and then you could have had a platform written,” Wynne said.
Wynne is typically a lawyerly speaker, especially in debates. She builds an intellectual case.
“We’ve got the lowest unemployment rate in nearly 20 years. The economy is growing, and outstripping other parts of Canada and the United States,” she said. “We’ve got 235,000 students whose tuition is being covered. Children whose prescription medication is being covered. We’re making our economy fairer for everyone . ... All of that is happening at the same time that the economy is growing.”
All true, as far as it goes. In lawyer mode, she forced Horwath to defend her stance against using legislation to force ends to public-sector strikes. Legislation is a sledgehammer, but there’s a problem when a strike can go on indefinitely in a service, such as education, for which there’s no alternative.
“Nobody likes strikes,” Horwath said. “That’s why it’s important to do everything you can to make sure those strikes don’t happen.”
But when they do, Wynne said, refusing to end them with legal force puts all the power in unions’ hands.
“The point that I want to make is, if there is ... no way to resolve
This is an election where we can actually make change for the better.
an issue, how does government act in the public interest if that tool is removed?”
It’s a problem awaiting a Horwath government and Wynne lit it up with a laser.
But Wynne rarely pulls off an appeal that makes you want to follow wherever she leads.
Whereas Horwath Sunday went beyond argument and defined a vision.
“This is an election where we can actually make change for the better,” Horwath said as she established her own theme in the first minutes. “We can have a government that puts people at the heart of every decision. So it’s not about getting a bump in the polls. It’s not about slogans and bumper stickers ... I believe that we can make this province a place where we can build a good life and I’m asking that folks have some faith in that for a change.”
Wynne made her best case for herself, and if you like her you probably liked seeing her lose her temper, but it’s very little, very late. Ford played the guy he’s been playing all along. Horwath kept doing the thing that’s been working.